Originally Posted by
somethingdotdotdot
Okay, so I think I should explain why I believe tombstalker is better than strix in this deck in more detail; in particular why he is neither clunky nor win-more. I will preface this by saying that I have only been playing and tinkering with this deck for about 1-2 months and there are many here who have had more experience. I should also say that my current meta lacks true aggro decks (decks that aim to kill you by turn 3-4 with redundant creatures and burn). Thats not to say there aren't aggro-control decks such as delver, but those are fundamentally different because they win with card quality rather than sheer redundancy.
So let me begin by examining how tombstalker fares versus strix against the midrange decks that I am typically facing.
Jund: This is basically the red version of this deck, trading visions for confidant and adding in an extra punishing fires engine. In my experience, the board usually comes down to a stall of my goyf vs his goyf with a couple of drs's on each side of the table. In these stalls, he usually has the advantage since he has a recurring burn engine that he will eventually assemble to both win goyf wars and kill off all of my shamans. From my experience, this win the top-deck situation is common versus not only Jund, but the mirror and virtually all other GBx decks. In this case top-decking a strix is fine--it'll draw you an extra card and give you an extra blocker (if he doesn't already have the punishing engine assembled), but it really doesn't impact the board. Stalker, on the other hand, comes down and applies immediate pressure. In doing so, I make both sylvan and confidant a lot worse for him because his life is no longer an expendable resource.
The other complaint is that I remove my own graveyard making goyf smaller and taking away shaman food. In these GBx matchups, I believe that this is a good thing. Due to the critical mass of removal from the opponent (swords +decay from GBW and bolt+decay from GBR), we tend to have less goyfs and shamans than our opponents. The result is that they need the fuel more than we do; by depriving them, we can starve their shamans and goyfs while the stalker flies over and pressures their life total.
Deathblade: This deck also relies heavily on confidant for card advantage, but it has far more ways to remove stalker than other decks so its a less attractive options. Instead of punishing fires, deathblade uses umezawa's jitte to grind out card advantage versus the smaller creatures in the format. There are definitely ways to deal with jitte in this deck (4x decays), but there are often more imminent threats than the jitte such as confidant that we want to decay first. Once a jitte has 1-2 counters on it (shitty situation, but not completely uncommon), our strixs become UB: draw a card. Stalker, on the other hand, is in fine shape and requires 5 counters to kill (since they dont actually play any fliers to equip to now).
As for removing my graveyard versus deathblade, again I think this is often an advantage. Deathblade runs snapcaster mages, so they want to hit your graveyard with drs saving juicy targets like brainstorm and stp to snap back later on in the game. Once you don't have targets, they will either need to remove their chaffe (fow, thoughtseize) or hold back their drs's drain. I will admit that delver does often make goyf 1 or 2 power smaller, but since the deck wants to make land drops (opposed to delver), you do not need to delve 6 (I often delve 3-4 if I have nothing else to do with the mana to keep an artifact in the graveyard).
As for why I don't think a stall is in our favor versus other midrange decks: In my understanding, the deck's strength lies in its burst card advantage--by this I mean that around turn 4-5 you tend to suddenly draw 3 extra cards out of nowhere. This is opposed to the incremental card advantage that the other midrange decks are currently running: resolving confidant and continually drawing 1 extra card a turn. This isn't to say that the deck cannot grind people out with lilianas, jaces, and shardless agents, but most opposing midrange decks run cards that are the exact same or functionally the same (bloodbraid vs agent; deathblade runs the jaces and snapcasters instead of lilianas). Due to this burst advantage, this deck has the most advantage right after a vision resolves and that advantage will often get worn down as the turns go by. Given enough time, both jund and deathblade will have better outs to a board stall than this deck does: fires recursion to kill walkers+small dudes from Jund and jitte+skull equipped to anything to outclass all of our creatures. The only advantage BUG has over these decks is that all of our threats cost less: goyf is a 1G and stalker is XBB; after the 5th or 6th land, jund and deathblade can utilize the mana better than we can.
The final point I want to make is that we should consider the threat density of the deck versus removal density of most mid-range decks. Most typical midrange decks run about 6-7 hard removal spells to deal with must kill-now creatures (4 stps + 2 snap from blade, 4 decay + 3 liliana from jund along with 7 burn spells, 4 decay+ 3-4 wishes for pulse + 3 fires from aggro loam, 4 stp + 3 decay from junk). Correspondingly, looking at how many "must-kill creatures" (creatures that will often take over the game if not dealt with) other decks play is around 10-12 (4 goyf/drs/confidant from jund, 4 goyf/confidant+3 kotr from junk, 3 kotr + 2-3 goyf + 4 confidant from aggro loam, 4 goyf/drs/delver + 2 stalker from bug delver, 4confidant/drs/mystic from blade). Our deck, with strix, runs less than any of these; our "must-kill" threat density with strix is only 8: 4drs/4goyf.
